Journey to the Bottom of the World: Driving in South America’s Patagonia Region

James Tate

Apr 25, 2016

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You could be alone here. Beautifully alone.

Patagonia is the continental Atlantis that humanity forgot to populate, where jagged mountain peaks shoot into the sky unbowed by millions of years of gale-force winds, and glaciers get bigger with time. This southernmost stretch of South America is one of the few places left on Earth that offers a genuine expedition experience. It is more popular now than ever, yet few have seen it. Far fewer have seen it the way I will.

I need no steed. Just a brand-new Subaru and the bare essentials: heated seats, navigation, and a simple support team consisting of two diesel Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, an SUV, a ferry captain and his small crew, three guides, a facilitator, a bodyguard, a man with an expense account, restaurant and resort reservations, unlimited tires, and a truck full of gas and sandwiches. Okay, so I’m no conquistador, but hear me out: If you’re able to rent a car in Argentina, you won’t even get it over the border to Chile, and vice versa. Even if you had local citizenship and a local license—and somehow owned a car registered locally—you’d still need tires and, crucially, gas.

Regardless of how you make your way through Patagonia, you’ll probably start by flying into El Calafate, Argentina. Magellan described the native “Patagon” as giants that towered twice as tall as humans. Upon arriving and being greeted by vistas of glowing turquoise lakes and an accompanying vastness of space, you find it easy to understand why he may have assumed as much—you feel physically smaller. Hopping off the plane, I make my way not to the giant tour bus filled with Germans in short-shorts, but to a small fleet of, we’ll say, recent, Chilean-spec Subaru product. Our hosts from the Japanese automaker have lined up a selection of Outbacks, Foresters, and Crosstreks in which to make the approximately 1000-mile journey to the “bottom of the world.” Two of each car makes six in total, and the Hilux full of gas and tires plays caboose behind our 12-person posse.

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Our first destination, the Perito Moreno Glacier, is just shy of 50 miles outside of town, so I find myself a trusty co-driver and a loaded Outback for the first leg. The ride is all paved highways, and the Outback is as tight as a drum and reasonably quiet to boot, offering a hell of a lot more comfort than I ever would have expected on an “expedition.” The navigation system even has an inkling of where I am.

The glacier is a sight to behold. Its sheer size doesn’t set in until you’re right up on it; even then it takes the full computing power of your brain to understand the scale. Aircraft-carrier-sized sheets of ice chip and drop in slow motion, crashing into the lake below. The delayed sound wave serves as a reminder that I’m not even that close to it after all.

As impressive as it is, our convoy has to hit the road if we’re going to make it into Chile by the end of the day. El Calafate is on the way, so it makes sense to stop for lunch. A pair of stray dogs lounging in the sun outside the restaurant is a good sign—an indication of a benevolent owner and food that tastes at least good enough for a dog to eat. Satisfied with the meal, we troll the town with the secret agenda of finding a clean little room in which to have a contemplative 15 minutes ahead of the four-hour drive into Chile. Colorful tiendas, murals, and figurines pop on this uncommonly sunlit fall day, and big-name outdoor retailers compete with local coffeehouses for domination of each small block. The town is run amok with people who intend to strap on experiences as they do their bright and branded backpacks, not daring to attempt an understanding of the culture that surrounds them.

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But my co-driver and I are gone before the photo-album fillers can taint our experience. About 100 klicks out of El Calafate, we nose our sparkling-clean Outback onto the first dirt road of the trip and the driving starts in earnest. These roads are the haphazard kind: sometimes graded, and sometimes worn and gouged with water tracks, and punctuated randomly by large stones revealed by the last rain. Every time the group has the mettle to pick up speed, something shocking seems to appear—the unpredictable surface does a wonderful job of impeding progress and keeping our confidence low. Still, as the clock ticks on, speeds rise—50, 60, 75 mph. I try to form a critical opinion, but the Outback remains comfortable. The lack of a single squeak or rattle over this sort of washboard terrain is truly a testament to modern engineering.

“Picturesque” is too small and shallow a word to describe this part of the world. Every now and then, you lose yourself looking down at the map, maybe trying to figure out if the rutty thing you’re on is really supposed to be the road, then you look up and think, “Holy s–t.” It doesn’t matter where you are on the trip; the otherworldly backdrop is invariably impossible for the brain to understand. If someone said you’d been knocked out and transported to one of those planets 436,000 light-years away that NASA thinks just might be able to support human life, you’d probably say: “Oh, okay. That makes sense.”

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The border crossings will bring you right back to Earth, however. We tend to cross in the middle of nowhere, and although seamless for us journalists, the process is hilariously complicated for our hosts. Border-control points tend to consist of little more than a lone, rundown house and a bar gate over a single-track dirt road, but the process of getting the gate to raise is an arduous one. You see, 12 Americans can’t just waltz into Chile at a suspiciously uncommon crossing from Argentina driving Chilean-registered cars that belong to a Japanese carmaker. So Subaru has hired chaperones with local passports to meet us at each crossing and drive the cars over. The cops ask each driver how many gringos he’s carrying until we’re all accounted for, and the long process of questioning begins. This happens on entry and exit of each country. If nothing else, it makes for some damn cool passport stamps.

The casualty list at the end of the day isn’t so bad: We’re collectively down a couple of tires, some fog lamps, and, oh, yes, every single windshield. It seems some of us were following a little closer than would have been ideal. But as our dusty all-wheel-drive wagon train pulls into an insane James Bond villain’s lair of a hotel dug into the ground in the middle of nowhere, it’s instantly clear that the expedition is trending up.

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The wing-shaped hotel is embedded strategically in Chile’s famed Torres del Paine National Park, offering a kingly view of the Cordillera Paine mountain range and a vibrant glacial lake below. The water is so blue that your tropical vacation instinct would have you dive in. Regrettably, you’d die almost instantly. This water is blue because it’s mineral-rich glacial melt-off, which incidentally is the reason it isn’t frozen solid.

Our awesome hotel actually is situated on leased land. Also on the nearly 300,000-acre plot is an estancia, a self-sufficient residence and surrounding farm belonging to the landowners (it even has its own police station and school). Here, they create wool, which means that like so many other farms in Patagonia, they have sheep. We meet, and then eat, some of the aforementioned sheep. With a casual, pragmatic barbarism, the lamb is wire-tied to a cross, which is then jammed into the ground near a beechwood fire and slow-roasted for hours with a lot of salt and garlic before eating. Done right, it’s epic.

Familiar now with the precise location of paradise, we set off, headed farther south, this time in a Crosstrek. The roads are dirt, but, here in Chile, they’re well graded, and we’re able to make excellent time. Comfort is about finding just the right speed, where the suspension rebounds with a sine wave exactly inverse relative to the road, counteracting the oscillations. Winding our way out of the national park, we drive through a vast area full of finger-shaped lakes and inlets. Our lunch stop is atop a small hill, about a quarter of a mile from one of the many small bays. Pricey sailboats docked offshore force the realization that you could navigate here from Santiago, the country’s capital, and have an otherworldly lunch in the middle of an untouched paradise. These people are living the dream.

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We drive for hundreds of miles, the topography changing as often as the wind. One moment we’re in a desert; the next, we’re at the top of an Andean pass. The Crosstrek is just as capable as the Outback but is a little light on oomph in comparison, and a lot lighter on luxury. Another border crossing; this time, we’re headed back into Argentina. Inside, a guard watches The Simpsons. His uniform: an “Old Guys Rule” sweatshirt. He debates the correctness of our paperwork with his wife—also a cop, also in a sweatshirt. As cumbersome as these processes are, we do realize that we’re spoiled rotten: While we’re waiting for the red tape to be cut, the support team is outside topping off each car with gas.

A long day of driving lands us in Punta Arenas, a port city that for centuries has served as the starting point for more expeditions than you can count—but that doesn’t make it a city you want to take time in. It’s our first experience with traffic and general commotion in days. After a night’s rest, we’ll cross the Strait of Magellan and drive to the bottom of the world.

Wiping the sleep from our bleary eyes, we aim our new ride, a black Forester, at the giant steel mouth of a ferry that will take us across the strait. What the hell is a boat this big doing down here? How could there possibly be that much demand for daily crossings? These thoughts evaporate when the cool factor of what we’re doing sets in. The Strait of Magellan is a thing you read about in history texts but never, ever think you’ll see. Vicious and temperamental, it’s been pulling ships into of its deep black waters since the early 1500s thanks to its narrowness and its utterly unpredictable weather. Even today, the winds are the highest we’ve seen the entire trip. Thankfully, they’re tailwinds. Above us, the sky is a frantic kaleidoscope. The sun shines for a minute; then the sky goes black, and it rains for another minute. Even when we’re less than a quarter-mile from the shore, there’s no way to tell what the weather will be on landing.

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You get the impression that not many people cross here. The boat may just as well have dropped us off in the middle of a field somewhere. There’s the dirt road, sure, but there’s no certainty that it leads anywhere. It does, though: to Ushuaia, a place that can lay legitimate claim to the title, “El Fin del Mundo.” This last leg is taken at a less than hurried pace. The need to complete the mission is overwhelmed by the desire to make this incredible feeling of freedom last longer. The approach into Ushuaia is a feast for the eyes, as the pavement winds through forest and up snow-capped mountains and comes back down again, revealing the southernmost city on the continent below.

There are so few places you can go to have an actual adventure anymore. There are endless experiences designed to make you feel like you’re an explorer, but it’s so easy to pull back the curtain. Like being in Las Vegas, a peek in the wrong direction quickly reveals the stagecraft and kills the illusion. Patagonia is different. It’s a ghost world; it’s what the prettier parts of the inhabited earth might look like without people. It’s quickly growing in popularity, yes, but it’s not popular. It offers endless, true adventure.

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That feeling of conquering untamed lands is washed away in just 3.5 short hours, the duration of our flight back to Buenos Aires. In no time, we’re in civilization. Coming back to U.S. soil, the contrast is starker still: not between the untouched and the modern, but between feeling free and being encumbered. Driving home, I’m struck by the speed trap on the six-lane highway leading out of the airport. On the side of the road by a concrete barrier, a man sits for hours with the engine running in his Chevrolet Caprice, checking to see if your number is higher than the number written on a sign you probably missed. If it is, he’ll come after you and take some of your numbers. Yesterday, I was free.